Critical Essay by Charles E. May

In the following essay, May rejects John V. Hagopian's reading of “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” and offers his own interpretation of the dialogue of the story.

“Every professional artist has met the questioner who asks of some detail: ‘Why did you do it so clumsily like that, when you could have done it so neatly like this?’”

—Joyce Cary, New York Times Book Review, April 30, 1950.

Everyone seems satisfied and perhaps a bit relieved now that John Hagopian has tidied up Hemingway's “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (Studies in Short Fiction, Winter 1964). The dialogue discrepancy that had scholars counting lines...